NEWSLETTER
In the 2016, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. In 2017, they made it to Game 5 of the NLCS. In 2018, they won 95 games, which was a relative struggle, but a feat nonetheless. Unfortunately, a red-hot Brewers team caught up to them by game 162, forcing a game 163, which they lost … before dropping the Wild Card Game, in extras, to the Rockies.
That stunk, but it’s hard to say that season was a “failure,” by any reasonable standards. The Cubs were one bonus game away from being the NL’s No. 1 seed. And that generally felt like they still had a team in 2018.
Unfortunately, after that, everything went down hill, and that sh*t is still rolling.
In 2019, the Cubs failed to make the postseason, and were particularly miserable late in the year. After the season, the Cubs’ future Hall-of-Fame manager, Joe Maddon, exited the organization. (A year later, future Hall-of-Fame executive Theo Epstein did the same. About a month after that, Len Kasper left the Cubs to “live out his dream” on the South Side of Chicago.)
There also was a global pandemic that canceled the first-half of the 2020 season, leading to an ugly fight between players and owners, and ultimately resulted in a shortened 60-game season. The Cubs did technically make the postseason that year, but there were no fans and no one really counts that as anything meaningful, because it wasn’t. It never felt good, including when the Cubs were swept out of the playoffs.
Before the 2021 season, the Cubs traded their Cy Young runner-up, Yu Darvish, to the Padres and non-tendered Kyle Schwarber.
Since then …
At the 2021 deadline, the Cubs got rid of almost all of the remaining World Series core. Gone were Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, and Javy Baez. And the Cubs also traded Craig Kimbrel (in a deal that has been a complete failure), and fan-favorite Andrew Chafin. For however correct it was to make those deals, at the time was hardly anything you’d call “fun.”
Not long after that deadline, the Cubs also parted ways with Jake Arrieta (again), whom they had re-signed before the season, and it wasn’t a particularly amicable breakup. In fact, it was downright ugly. And, of course, the Cubs wound up finishing the season 20 games under .500.
In 2022, the Cubs finished 14 games under .500. There was little joy throughout the year, if any.
In 2023, the Cubs made a push in July that led Jed Hoyer to buy at the deadline, but a September collapse left them at home in October.
The ensuing offseason started off excitingly enough, with the surprise addition of Craig Counsell and rumors of active involvement in the sweepstakes for Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani. But not only did neither of those pan out, the Cubs wound up being infuriatingly for so much of the offseason. We got Shota Imanaga, which was great, and the deal for Michael Busch looks good, as well (though it was a gamble). But Hector Neris has not been a good signing and Cody Bellinger was added at the very last minute (and is not playing like the star he was last year). Again, the point here is that the process was hardly fun as a fan.
And then things got even worse.
On Opening Day, Justin Steele went down with an injury and Adbert Alzolay blew the first of what has become 17 blown saves for the Cubs by July 3. About a million other players went on the injured list in the meantime, and the Cubs now find themselves eight games under .500 and 12.0 games back in last place of the NL Central.
Not like they don’t have a financial advantage, either:
We are now staring down the barrel of another sell-off for the Cubs. Great.
My point? It’s right there in the headline. It has not been fun to be a Cubs fan for a LONG long time. In fact, it downright stinks. For the second time since 2012, the Cubs were forced to rebuild (not entirely without their own fault mixed in there) and this, the first year it was supposed to really turn around, has been an unmitigated disaster. Absent some extremely aggressive and creative maneuvering at this deadline and over the offseason, there’s not much of a reason to think this core group can succeed next year, either. And “aggressive and creative” has not been a hallmark of this front office. Hoping on prospects is always part of the game, but should it be the ONLY part of the game?
Here’s another problem: Jed Hoyer will this offseason be entering his final year under contract (as far as we know) as the President of Baseball Operations. That means the Cubs could have a lame duck president at an extremely critical time.
It’s not all bad. There is money coming off the books this year and the Cubs do have the most top-100 prospects in baseball (despite what some people might tell you, that’s objectively better than the alternative because of course it is). But that doesn’t really make it feel like some big turnaround is coming SOON. Prospects take time to pan out and some never do.
I’m not ready, today, to tell you exactly what must change. But something – significant – does need to happen in the months ahead. This team is a mess and has been almost wholly joyless for about seven years. It is unacceptable and we deserve better as fans.
